Status Update: Oct. 8, 2023

Anastasia had been in France for two years, pursuing her studies, before returning to her home town in Nebraska for (at minimum) a two week visit. Nick was beside himself with excitement at the overwhelming gift of seeing her again. They had intermittently corresponded during her long absence, but before her departure there had been what for him was an exceptionally important romance. It was free of future obligations and rash promises, and had broken off before she went away. Nevertheless, the fact remained that he felt no one had ever understood him better than Anastasia had. She was hilarious, stimulating, deeply curious, and so able to catch subtle things that others failed to see. Nick prepared himself for a certain amount of culture shock on her part, and at least a brief period of adjustment. He was struck, however, during their first meetings by an impression that she seemed so far away in her manner. It was as though she had become thoroughly accustomed to a larger world, filled with refinement, sophisticated people, and strikingly different attitudes and ways of perceiving. She didn't say so, but he could tell that nearly everything she beheld in her old environment seemed to her small, dingy, drearily backward, and borderline laughable. How could he avoid being associated with all the elements of a former life she appeared to have outgrown? He did not believe that he had mentally stood still in the time she was away. He had continued to immerse himself in art, and felt that he had many ideas and experiences that had changed him for the better. Was this merely a fantasy of enlargement and inner progress? If Anastasia's life was the real thing, did his town and what he considered beautiful and meaningful about it shrivel to nothing by hopeless comparison? Or was she merely a snob now and as a result blind to aspects of a place and its qualities that she at one time saw with greater clarity, sympathy and pleasure? Nick's troubling inability to recover common ground with Anastasia--much less a route to restored mutual passion--reminded him of a recurring plot in Thomas Hardy novels. And if Hardy was the appropriate guide to his speculation about future prospects, his chances were dim indeed.